Life & Wisdom Quote by George Chapman

Chapman’s line treats desire less like a lofty muse and more like a bodily weather system: heat drives out heat, passion dislodges passion. The phrasing is bluntly mechanical - “doth drive out,” “doth expel” - as if the heart were a room where one rowdy crowd can only be cleared by letting in a louder one. It’s a poet’s way of demystifying emotion without denying its force. Love doesn’t get “resolved” here; it gets replaced.

The intent is pragmatic, almost medicinal. Early modern audiences would have recognized the humoral logic underneath: “heat” isn’t only metaphor but temperament, a physical state tied to lust, anger, ambition, grief. Chapman borrows that pseudo-science to make a sharp psychological claim: people don’t stop wanting; they redirect wanting. That’s both consoling and bleak. Consoling because heartbreak has a cure that doesn’t require moral purity - just time and a new fixation. Bleak because it implies we’re not masters of our inner life so much as subjects of competing appetites.

The subtext is about control and self-deception. “All know” pretends this is common wisdom, which doubles as social pressure: if you’re still stuck, you’re refusing the obvious remedy. Chapman also slyly suggests that what we call constancy may be inertia, and what we call recovery may be substitution.

In a culture obsessed with rhetoric and self-fashioning, the line lands as both advice and indictment: the self is not a stable core but a sequence of takeovers.